I was on my way back to Chicago Midway on a Southwest flight when I saw this outside my window seat. We were traveling east and it was several miles to our north, but impressive nonetheless. From my perspective, it was looked a lot like pictures you always see of comets. For the few seconds I was able to see it, it was burning white hot and got more intense just before it broke up into 3 pieces and quickly disappeared from site.

Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday January 06, 2010 @09:45PM
from the incredible-journey dept.

grrlscientist writes "While living and working as a marine biologist in Maldives, Charles Anderson noticed sudden explosions of dragonflies at certain times of year. He explains how he carefully tracked the path of a plain, little dragonfly called the Globe Skimmer, Pantala flavescens, only to discover that it had the longest migratory journey of any insect in the world."

Barence writes: "With help from readers of PC Pro, Sky News in the UK launched an undercover investigation into rogue PC repair shops. As a result, Sky's cameras caught technicians scouring through private photos, stealing passwords and over-charging for basic repairs. It was a simple enough job: "To create the fault, we simply loosened one of the memory chips so Windows wouldn't load. To get things working again, one needs only push the chip back into the slot and reboot the machine. Any half-way competent engineers should fix it in minutes." But these technicians had other ideas, stealing photos and documents, as well as login details for email and bank accounts. The eye-opening story is currently running on UK TV, and this PC Pro article has the full report."

suraj.sun writes: The restart of the Large Hadron Collider has been pushed back further, following the discovery of vacuum leaks in two sectors of the experiment.

The world's largest particle collider is now unlikely to restart before mid-November, according to a Cern press statement. The project had been expected to start again in October.

To repair the leaks, which are from the helium circuit into the insulating vacuum, sectors 8-1 and 2-3 will have to be warmed from 80K to room temperature. Adjacent sub-sectors will act as 'floats', while the remainder of the surrounding sectors will be kept at 80K, Cern said in the statement. The repair work will not have an impact on the vacuum in the beam pipe.

Cern has pushed back the restart a number of times, as repair work has continued. To begin with, scientists said the LHC experiment would restart in April 2009.

In May, Cern told ZDNet UK that the restarted experiment could run through the winter to make up some of the lost time. Normally, running the experiments through the alpine winter is prohibitively expensive, due to high electricity costs. However, as the experiment has not been running since last September, Cern would have the budget to cover energy costs over the winter.